Review: Nokia Lumia 710 – The Budget Fighter

Introduction:

When Nokia announced its agreement to sidetrack Symbian and use Windows Phone instead to make their smartphones nobody could have thought that it’ll deliver its first Windows Phone before 2012. But in merely eight months Nokia gave us a couple of Windows Phones, Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. While Lumia 800 is targetted at the higher end of the market (and now Lumia 900 ready to take that position away), Lumia 710 is more suited to newcomers to the platform. For people worried about the processing power, it uses the same hardware as Lumia 800 while staying in the reach of the masses. For Nokia it’s the reach of Lumia 710 than Lumia 800 which will decide if their Windows Phone strategy is successful or not.

Design:

Nokia Lumia 710 doesn’t come with all the perks its elder sibling carries like AMOLED display or polycarbonate body but looks are not cheap either. Though it’s on the cheaper side, Nokia has managed to balance between the quality and the price. Given the price segments it’s put in it was obvious but Lumia 710 still has its own skin to show off. The design of the Lumia 710 is actually inspired by the Symbian Belle running Nokia 603. The device is all plastic and by no means it feels cheap. The back of the device has rubber coating over it which apart from giving it a good grip also gives classy look and feel. The good thing with 710 is that its back cover can be changed and you can pick from variety of colors.

The top of the phone hosts 3.5mm jack, microUSB port and a power cum lock/unlock key. The right side of the phone has volume rocker and a shutter key. The flaw with the shutter key is that there’s very less space between half-press and full-press. This becomes irritating while clicking photos because even the slightest push fully presses the key and images may turn out be out of focus because you’re not able to ‘focus’ on the object first.

There’s a charging port also on the right side. On the bottom you’ll find the lanyard socket alone. On the left side there’s actually nothing but the latch which is used to open the back cover.

The most of the front is taken by the 3.7” display. The display used in the Lumia 710 is the normal TFT type but Nokia has added its own polarizing layer to make it ClearBlackDisplay (CBD) which enhances the sunlight legibility. Despite of this addition we found that the display of Lumia 710 had yellowish tint. Above the display there’s a proximity sensor and an ambient light sensor. Below the display are the three regular keys found WP handsets. The back key is as its name suggests, used to go backwards in browser and exiting apps. When long pressed it brings up the task switcher. The ‘Windows’ key in the middle isn’t a menu as one would think but it takes you directly to the homescreen from any app. Again, long pressing it will launch voice commands. The search key is useful to launch Bing search.

On the back of the Lumia 710 there’s a 5 MP AF camera and single LED flash. As we open the back cover of the Lumia 710 we find a big 1350 mAh battery and a microSIM slot. Like every other Windows Phone handset in the market (with the rare exceptions) Lumia 710 too doesn’t have memory card slot. Rather it comes with 8GB of inbuilt memory but the actual memory available for use is 6.28GB. You’ll also find the loudspeaker below the battery.